Lucky Ducks
Written, Produced & Directed by Tracey Jackson
Like many documentaries the film I ended up with was not the film I set out to make. The original film was going to be called SPRING BREAK and was going to take place over three weeks while my fifteen year old daughter worked in a slum school in Mumbai while all her friends were scattered about the world’s resorts. I then read a book called THE PRICE OF PRIVILEGE and realized the story I wanted to tell had many more layers and implications to it than I had thought and there was such an epidemic of unhappy supposedly lucky teens out there, LUCKY DUCKS was born. Two years and a hundred and fifty hours of footage later, I ended up with a very personal film about what it means to raise a child today, how what we carry with us from our own childhood bleeds into our parenting whether we know it or not; and that to fix your kid you really have to fix yourself first.
On that journey, I travelled from Mumbai, to California, New Jersey to Montana interviewing experts, gurus and people who were just grappling with raising their kids. While the stories were different the themes were often the same.
I started with the question “why is today’s upper middle class youth so unhappy, they have more than any generation?” I wandered through many doors and learned many facts, I wanted to make a film with answers and charts and graphs. But, the film that came out was a very personal story about my mother, my daughter and myself. I was still fighting the urge, to add charts and graphs and more experts, and then after screening it for a friend she said, “but Tracey, you and Taylor are the charts and graphs.”